Monthly Archives: March 2010

I believe that it is usually unwise to second guess a coach whose team you haven’t followed closely. So instead of second guessing Ohio State basketball coach Thad Matta, I’ll ask a question of those who follow his team: why did Matta persist in playing a 1-3-1 zone that gave Tennessee shots from five feet and in all night, and that made it difficult for Ohio State to rebound when »

Under government medicine, all health care is necessarily political. Why anyone would want to live in that world is beyond me. Here is the latest from Great Britain, where the Labour government is trying to keep budget cuts secret until after the election: Tens of thousands of NHS workers would be sacked, hospital units closed and patients denied treatments under secret plans for £20 billion of health cuts. The sick »

One thing about Paul Krugman, he always gets the memo. You can count on his column in the New York Times to echo the Democratic Party’s talking points of the moment, whatever they are. Thus, his current column accuses Republicans of threatening violence against those poor little Democrats. It’s a dumb claim, so it suits Krugman perfectly. His “evidence” is lame beyond belief. After referring to “the wave of vandalism »

The consequences of the Democrats’ health care takeover begin to be felt: Remember the part in the ObamaCare pitch when they said if you like your current healthcare, it won’t change? Turns out it might. Companies are already announcing that their healthcare premium costs are going through the roof. Some are responding by firing people. Some are cutting benefits. And some are presumably eating it. But costs they are a-rising. »

Seven years to the month after the invasion of Iraq, lefty pundit David Corn is still pushing the “Bush lied” theme. Fortunately, Pete Wehner is determined not let Corn get away with the falsehoods upon which he bases his case. In this post, Pete demolishes Corn’s latest “Bush lied” argument almost line-by-line. If you take the trouble to work through Pete’s extended analysis, I think you will reach two conclusions: »

In the late 1960s, the actor Tony Randall visited Dartmouth. Randall was a strident critic of the war in Vietnam and rather full of himself about the subject. He proudly told us that some major public figure had attacked the tone of his criticism of President Johnson by saying, “Randall may be able to talk that way to Rock Hudson, but he can’t talk that way about the President of »

Patterico documents approximately 20 death threats against Sarah Palin and her family that have been made on Twitter by a liberal who expresses admiration for Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. A sample: @Palin360 you need 2 b assassinated soon we ll settle 4 one of the family if not u! You probably won’t hear about this anywhere else, but if a Glenn Beck fan threatened to murder Nancy Pelosi, it »

It is often said that press coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is biased against Israel. That’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. Sometimes, it borders on insane. Consider this specimen, from the world’s most influential news agency, the Associated Press. The AP’s bureau chief for Israel and the Palestinian territories, Steven Gutkin, wrote it with help from correspondent Mohammed Daraghmeh, reporting from Ramallah. This is an “analysis” piece, which »

Only 9 percent of Israeli Jews believe that President Obama is pro-Israel, according to a poll taken by Smith Research on behalf of the Jerusalem Post. 48 percent said that the Obama favors the Palestinian side, while 30 percent said his administration is neutral. The remaining 13 percent expressed no opinion. The 9 percent number is up from 4 percent last August, but the difference is only slighly outside the »

Democratic congressmen walking through Saturday’s antiObamacare rally at the Capitol have charged that they were subjected to racist and bigoted epithets by protesters. Andrew Breitbart does a great job of summarizing the circumstantial evidence that these charges are bogus. At the center of these charges over the weekend was Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, who now accuses Republicans of aiding and abetting terrorism. Subtle he is not. Rep. Clyburn »

Worshipers of Fidel Castro among the leftover left frequently cite the triumph of “free” health care in Castro’s Cuba. If the price of free care is slavery, what the heck? In their utopia, freedom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway. Castro himself falls into my personal “only the wrong survive” category along with Pete Seeger and Robert Byrd, but Castro’s longevity is not an unmixed curse. It’s good »

Republican Whip Eric Cantor held a press conference this morning in which he did an excellent job of firing back at the Democrats for trying to make a political issue out of the fact that a few of them have allegedly received threats as a result of voting for government medicine. Cantor pointed out that he, too, has received such threats as well as anti-Semitic messages, and that a bullet »

Last night, in the hope of gaining insight into Jim Kim, I attended a reception for Dartmouth’s new president. President Kim began his talk by explaining why he moved from a position where he helped improve health care delivery to the world’s poor to a job as a college administrator. According to Kim, this decision was inspired by a quote from one of Dartmouth’s former presidents, which Kim said he »

Solomon B. Watson IV was the top legal officer of the New York Times back in 2005 and 2006 when, notoriously, it published two stories compromising top-secret counterterrorism programs. I wrote about what the Times had done at the time in “Exposure,” as Gabriel Schoenfeld did in “Has the New York Times violated the Espionage Act?” Indeed, Schoenfeld’s forthcoming book Necessary Secrets was inspired by the recurring issues raised by »

I’ve written elsewhere that we should wait at least a week or two before paying attention to polls on Obamacare, but this one is too remarkable to pass up: Rasmussen finds that 55 percent of voters want Obamacare repealed. That is extraordinary. Has the public ever greeted passage of a major piece of legislation with this much disgust? I can’t imagine that it has. And so far, at least, there »

John Boehner begins his Des Moines Register column on Barack Obama’s visit to Iowa with the observation: “It’s fitting that President Obama returns to Iowa City today to sell a skeptical public on his massive government takeover of health care.” I thought Boehner might have in mind the arrival of “Professor” Harold Hill’s political successor in River City, but he’s thinking of something more prosaic: It was here in May »

It has rarely been more important to recur to first principles in addressing the critical issues that lie before us. For me, the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here) is the periodical that lights the way. The new issue of the CRB includes two brilliant essays on Winston Churchill, a man whose life and works illuminate first principles. We bring these two essays to your attention courtesy of our friends »